New Orleans-area native Sean Patton makes his comedy-special TV debut at 11:30 p.m. Friday (June 21) on Comedy Central’s “The Half Hour,” but local fans will get several opportunities this week to preview his very-funny, very-NSFW work. Patton, who attended Slidell High School before heading out to Los Angeles, New York City and the standup-comedy road, will perform at 8 p.m. Tuesday (June 18) at The Howlin’ Wolf, 10 p.m. Tuesday at Lost Love Lounge, and, finally, at 8 p.m. Thursday (June 20) in the Voodoo Garden of the House of Blues.

“All of my life, I kind of knew I wanted to be some kind of writer-performer,” Patton said during a recent phone interview from Los Angeles, while between road gigs in Vancouver and Chicago. “When I was really young, early teens, I wanted to act. But the more you learn about the craft of acting, the less enticing it really is. As a kid -- this is stupid -- watching movies, I thought, ‘Oh, they’re so in the moment. They just turn the camera on and they act.’ And it’s not like that. It’s piece by piece by piece by piece.

“I wanted to do something bigger than that.”

Standup, he said, became that.

“The moment I started paying attention to it in my late teens, I knew this is it,” he said. “You are the writer, you are the performer. You also shoulder the brunt if it fails, and you raise yourself upon high if it succeeds. That’s what appealed to me most.”

Patton took his first crack at a set at Amberjack’s in Lakeview, and he remembers everything about that night.

“I remember what I wore,” he said. “I remember the set I did. I remember the drink I had before I went on.

“I remember just saying ‘Hello’ and being so shocked and alarmed at something I didn’t account for, which was how my voice sounded amplified. Just hearing my own voice over speakers. ‘Hello. Hey, listen to that!’ Just sharing with the audience my own marvel over what my voice sounded like when louder. They were not impressed with it. They were like, ‘Jokes, please.’”

That first time, he said, wasn’t as difficult as the second time (at True Brew Coffeehouse, where he became a regular) and the subsequent dozens of times after that.

“You do it the first time and you’re like, ‘I did it,’” he said. “The second time is when you fall down. That first year of doing standup, you should definitely bomb a lot, because you’re figuring it out. I would say the hardest part of standup is sticking with it through the first year. It weeds out the suckers. It really shows who can and who can’t do it.”

After a few years working in New Orleans, Patton left for Los Angeles in 2006.

“LA is a very hard city,” he said. “People like the sunshine and the weather, but growing up in New Orleans, you don’t care. I don’t, anyway. Weather is not important to me.”

So he moved to New York, a “standup-comedy Mecca,” he said.

“There are great comedy scenes all over America and all over the world,” he said. “New Orleans is becoming a comedy scene, but New York is still the Mecca. Moving there, you either move or bust a move. I don’t know how that actually goes, but you either get on stage or you get off.”

He got on, and has thrived ever since. Patton has appeared on “Late Night with Jimmy Fallon” and “Conan” (with another “Conan” appearance slated for later this year), and has tour dates booked for months out. Destinations this year will include clubs in Nashville, Cincinnati, Denver, Austin and Minneapolis, among other cities.

“I’m very happy,” Patton said. “I’ll debate this with anyone: Standup is the most difficult performance craft out there. Nothing is harder than standup. Not playing music, not ballet. Cage-fighting isn’t harder than standup. And it’s the most rewarding thing you can do.”